Americans: Still Settling Disputes Like Savage Brutes

The first headline describes a huge teen brawl, clearly. But the second tells of Civil War
re-enactors in downtown Belleville who were "announcing" the attack on Fort Sumter (which happened 150 years ago yesterday), while trying to rally men to join the Union army.

Granted, a massive internecine war in which hundreds of thousands perished does not equate with a teenage fight. But consider the ugly details of that teenage fight:

Dwayne Hawkins, who lives nearby in the 2700 block
of West Boulevard, said he attempted to break up the fight. He said
about 25 to 30 teenagers were attacking one female.

"They (were) jumping on this fourteen-year-old," Hawkins said. "It was mob action, and I tried to break it up."

Investigators
are not sure whether the fight Tuesday had any connection to the series
of fights that occurred Saturday night on West Boulevard and in the
adjacent Lincolnshire neighborhood.

During which fights, by the way, somebody got stabbed.

Like our forefathers, some members of our newest generation prefer to attack each other like beasts instead of working things out with words, intelligence and laws.